MIT along with Harvard University and Boston University is working to establish a Boston Area gigaPoP. This high speed network will provide access to the vBNS and other Institutions at 155Mb/sec speed. This work is being sponsored by the National Science Foundations "Connections to the Internet" program NSF 96-64. MIT's grant is award number NCR-99710525.
Our original proposal describes a network based around a NYNEX supplied ATM network. This network is not yet available (but soon!). In the meantime MCI is planning to install a DS3 (45Mb/sec) circuit into MIT, Harvard and Boston University directly. We plan to evolve this arrangement into a single Boston Area OC3 (or better) vBNS connection. MIT is a member of Internet2 and plans to use its vBNS connection for Internet2 connectivity as well.
MIT Network Operations maintains MITnet, the MIT portion of the Internet. MITnet today consists of an FDDI (100Mb/sec) ring of routers connecting to building Ethernets which operate at 10Mb/sec. We plan to use NSF funds to construct the gigaPoP itself and pay for the necessary inter-institutional high speed data circuits. We plan to use MIT matching funds to supplement the MIT network to increase local area speeds to the 100Mb/sec range (i.e., 100Mb Ethernet, ATM or gigabit Ethernet) as well as providing at least 100Mb/sec connections through the MIT backbone network.